To encourage myself to restart our words, I’m selecting a theme that will be easy for me: no theme at all.

raiment – (archaic or literary) clothing [In my view, this has the sense of a costume put on for show.][related to “array”. A shortened form of the old word “arrayment” dress, outfit]

[How public officials dressed for Halloween trick-or-treating:][M]embers of Waterloo city council and staff were seen on the streets of Waterloo wearing sackcloth and ashes, the penitent's traditional raiment. Around their necks hung a sign: "We accept no free candy."– The Record (Kitchener, Ontario), Nov. 9, 2002

”It seems that all the females in the Sass family are afflicted with a birthmark called a nevus.” He smiled. “It is what we call a strawberry mark. Amelia Sass has one … . Madeleine had one on her shoulder that was removed when she was a child. Her baby had one on the back of her neck, near the hairline … .”– Joe David Brown, Paper Moon

A new word, not yet in the dictionaries, from the world of sport. Specifically, from the spot of football, the one that USns choose to call “soccer”.

paradinha. [pronounced par-a-JEEN-ya; Portuguese for “little stop"] – a devastating penalty-kick maneuver. The shooter pauses unexpectedly before striking the ball—or even swings his foot through the air several times—before making contact. It's designed to throw off the goalkeeper's timing.

The move can have jaw-dropping results. Last month in a Brazilian professional game, a striker whose name is Neymar lined up to take a penalty kick. He began jogging slowly up to the ball, then suddenly accelerated his pace, then stopped abruptly, almost backpedaling. The goalie jumped off his feet toward his right side, leaving Neymar free to kick the ball into the opposite lower corner for an easy goal.

The paradinha’s legality is questioned. It isn't explicitly prohibited by current rules of FIFA, and pending possible rule-change or -clarification, it will be up to each referee to decide whether to permit the move at the World Cup, or whether to punish the maneuver as "unsporting behavior." "This is cheating," said FIFA President Joseph Blatter. "This 'stopping' must be stopped."

There is a history behind Brazil’s development of this move:

Trickery has long been an integral part of soccer in Brazil, where players, coaches and fans generally prize creativity and cunning over brute force. Some historians trace Brazilian soccer's history of innovation and showmanship to the late 1800s, when slavery had just been abolished and black players preferred to outwit their white opponents rather than touching them, fearing that physical contact could rankle racist fans. – Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2010. Most of this post is quotation from this article.

The dictionaries define today’s word as applying to water. But it can be used more broadly, as our quote shows.

catchment – 1. catching or collecting of water, especially rainwater 2. a reservoir , etc., for that collecting; the water so collected; the broader area from which collected

It was, of course, not just the passengers who benefited from the advent of the railroad. … .The American diet changed quickly as a result: By the early 1850s, fresh New Orleans peas were being consumed by Chicagoans a thousand miles away, and New Yorkers could enjoy that great delicacy, strawberries, for four months a year rather than just a few weeks because of the far greater catchment area.– Christian Wolmar, Blood, Iron & Gold

On a word site, it’s fitting to quote a book review titled Beginning With the Word. (The review’s subtitle tells the subject: How the cadences and diction of the King James Bible affected the prose style of American writers.)

. . .The King James Bible, Mr. Alter observes, has two major stylistic traits. It generally uses words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin origin, and its sentences often have a paratactic structure—that is, they juxtapose a series of short elements, sometimes joining them with a simple conjunction (usually "and").. . .Mr. Alter hears biblical diction and rhythms in ... Hemingway ..., Marilynne Robinson … and Cormac McCarthy …. Not that biblical echoes, by themselves, make for great literature. … Mr. McCarthy's "mesmerizing power as a stylist," he says, "often seems to exceed his range and insights as a novelist.". . .Mr. Alter prefers … Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." The Bible is a "strong thread" in that novel's prose and themes. … Ishmael, serving as Melville's narrator, can be paratactic, too: "Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard."– Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2010, reviewing Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter